I hear voices, sweet toned, sustained. They are calling me from the Sound. I wave, they wave. Are they drowning? No. Waving. I hear a single voice. Maaaaaaaaa. Maaaaaaaaa. There, a sleek brown head, far out in the water, round. A seal. Maaaaaaaaa.

Like this:

Somebody drowned in the Sound nine days ago. Got dealt a bad hand. The death card. Wait, that’s a good card. The happy squirrel card. I overheard a businessman and a boatman talking about it. They were guessing when the body will surface. The water is about 45 degrees so the boatman said that means it will be 14 days, shave off a day or two for salt water. The businessman knew that the man was overweight and went in alive. That’s worth a couple of days easy. He was drunk and beer means gas, so that will float him another day. They think he will come up today during the high tide. His fate. Bloated. Rolling, face to the clouds. Here I am.

Here’s what happened. And it happened, by the way, not by accident of matter or the motion or immovability of things in the space we occupied, but encased within one of the ineffably ridiculous number of possible ways in which it could have gone down. Buck had hold of my arm and I moved away from him and he asked so I finally told him look, do you remember what you said the day after my mother died? I came to your place and your mother asked who was in your room and you said O it is only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead. I don’t care that he sees death all day and night at the hospital and the blood and the smells and the bits of meaningless matter. What is dead, he said. Anybody’s death, what does it matter but the matter that he has to shovel away. I saw my mother die and I wouldn’t (couldn’t) humor her. End of story (that particular version). Cranly said the same, just kneel and think what you want. No. What does the Sound care? Look at it he said. Well look at it. It ebbs and it flows but it also swirls and eddies. It can be anywhere do anything move in all directions simultaneously. And when you look in infinite directions at its contact with dry (relatively) land, it is contained by nothing. No different in length than the coast of Britain. The Sound doesn’t have to care. It doesn’t have my problems.

Looking out the window you’d think this would be a choice place to live but I’m sitting on lawn furniture right now and I sleep in a hammock. If Haines stays much longer then I am out of here. Gone. Where? Buck on and on this morning about the great mother sea, fist to fist as we sit by the sea. Our mother the ash grey sea. Just look at it. The ballbusting snotgreen sea. Terrifying. Calling me Kinch the knife but I am not the knife. I can’t be knife. My knife would be made out of the infinitely small, forever dividing within itself the closer you look before it could ever slice something so sinewy as life or thought or time. Somebody show me where Augustine says the now is a knife edge without thickness. So many quote him on that without specific attribution but where does he say this. Show me specifically where. Perhaps I am blind. It is what he believes though, that this now moment, this one, right here and not the one where your eyes were moving when I began this sentence about the now moment but this one now this one divides the past infinite and exploding multitudinous and infinite to nausea from the future singular one. But which one? To be or to be? That is the question.